Trust Your Partner
by BecauseHeroesNeverDie
Summary: It might not seem like much, but another person is a whole other world. A world that you never really see into has completely changed the orbit of your own. -oneshot series focusing on various pairs of partners throughout the Game-
1. Going Nowhere

Now Rhyme was going to be a loser too. Just like him. It hurt that sometimes he thought about how, without any dreams, Rhyme wasn't going to go off and become famous and never talk to her loser brother ever again.

They weren't going anywhere at all.

Everywhere he went, Beat always met people who wanted to do things. Beat could only smile and nod as he listened to the excited jabber. He'd never found anything that could make his eyes bright or his cheeks red all over just by thinking about it.

Rhyme had always been one of those people. She could imagine herself doing just about everything, but she hadn't quite decided what it was she wanted yet. She seemed to just disappear sometimes, right in front of him.

Beat had never really found any appeal in what was inside his head. Just a bunch of tangled feelings that forever seemed to contradict each other. And it made him angry. Angry at the people who still expected him to get into a good high school and, through that, land himself into some comfortable company job.

Was it wrong that he wanted less and more than that all at once?

He had lost the game and more importantly he had lost Rhyme. They both had lost. If he could bring her back, she wouldn't remember who he really was and she wouldn't have her dreams. She'd be alive, but she'd never go anywhere.

"Never go anywhere" was a phrase Beat had heard associated with himself for most of his life. Sure, he failed exams and he fought with other kids, but he was starting to feel like he wasn't the miserable waste of space those words were supposed to make him into.

Because he could do this, damn it! He had something he wanted and he wanted it more than anything. He wanted his sister back and he wanted them both to be able to just live.

They might not be going anywhere, but Beat thought they deserved a chance too.

_Writer's woes: Have some conflicted Beat woooo fun times, right? So this is going to be a drabble, oneshot, etc collection for my ideas about little things mostly having to do with partners. I've been having a lot of really short scattered ideas lately and I feel weird about posting them all as separate fics, so this is here to ease my guilt. I'll post group centric stuff (and anything that doesn't really fit in) somewhere else. I'm thinking that all of these will be in-Game stuff. _

_so yeah_

_Stay fabulous,_

_Hillary _


	2. One Day

Sometimes Shiki would catch Neku reaching up and touching his ears. He would look like he'd so lost in those moments. Then he would catch himself, his hands dropping to his sides.

"Is something wrong, Neku? You keep messing with your ears," realization hit her and she bit her lip, "Do you miss your headphones?"

"Yeah, it's not that I want everyone to go away or anything anymore," Neku's eyes were trained on the ground and he kicked at nothing with his foot, "It's just that sometimes it gets too loud for me."

"Why don't we go see Mr. H? His place is always pretty quiet."

"Don't tell him that; he'll take it as an affront to himself."

Shiki laughed and led the way to the Wildkat cafe.

"Say, Neku, am I too loud?" Shiki mumbled, half-hoping that he wouldn't hear her.

"Well, I used to think so," Neku looked up, then down, and then turned to face her, clearly a little uncomfortable with answering the question, "But now I kinda like hearing you. That's why I don't bring my headphones out anymore."

"That's the reason why?"

"Well, one of the reasons," he replied, his chin dropping into his collar.

"L-let's get going!" Shiki knew she was losing him. It would be better for her to stop asking questions. He might slip away into "old Neku mode" and she liked him the way he was now too much for that.

They were also reaching the borderline of Awkward Territory, where all of the words that they wanted to say started clogging in their throats. Shiki wasn't bothered by all the unanswered questions anymore.

Not so long ago, Neku wouldn't tell anyone how he was feeling. Now, he was a little different. She wasn't quite used to hearing him tell grade-school stories in a wavering tone over bowls of ramen. Or blurting out some strange fact about likes or dislikes while searching through the racks at 104. Once he'd stopped in the middle of the street to tell her about his parents.

At first he'd just listened to people, but now he was reaching back to them. Neku was only just starting to expand his world.

Shiki was glad that she could see such a thing. Shiki made a little game of noticing something new every day. Some way they were different now, as the days went by, piling up. Shiki didn't want those days to feel empty and useless again.

Not now that she knew how much a day was worth.

_Writer's Woes: wow that got cheesy. I want to find a balance between my older more ornamented writing style and my super-bare-bones now style. So this appears to be Post-Game, but I think that it works with the spirit of this collection? Yeah, we're gonna go with that. _

_Stay fabulous,_

_Hillary_


	3. Dumbass

"Dumbass," Beat laughs, crushing a careless Noise under his skateboard.

It's the first word that came to him. If he uses it enough, maybe the sheer reality of his dumbness will stop punching him in the gut.

Beat can't think of anything worse than being stupid and worthless. Can't think of anything worse than the knot in his chest when he sees the look in his kid sister's eyes when she has to explain something to him for the ten thousandth time. How terrifying it is to feel like his whole life is a test with questions written in a language he wasn't ever taught and all he can ever do is stare at it and think about how he knows nothing. He cradles his head in his hands and hisses under his breath:

"Dumbass."

He twists his fingers all up in his hair and bites his lip and resists the urge to snap his pencil in half and start crying. He's always broken all the pencils. He can't fight back and he can't write anything.

That's what it's like when he talks to those reapers. He stares up at them, because he's only big for his age, and he hears them shouting at him and he's there. The blank paper and the ticking clock. The feeling that he can only ever be wrong and it hurts so much. So he does what he's always done, he shouts and makes up answers and snaps pencils. He waves his fists and screams at them because they are wrong and why do they always have to laugh at him?

Don't they think he already knows he's a dumbass?

_**Writer's Woes: So I feel really weird about posting this in the collection but I also feel weird about making it a separate oneshot. I write a lot of stuff like this to just vent, so uhhhh well this doesn't feel right anywhere so I'll just throw it in here. **_


	4. Technically Good

Shiki attacked the paper with her blackened eraser.

It ripped. She let out a sound that was something between a frustrated growl and a sob.

The design just didn't look good. It would never look good, because she was the one who made it. She just couldn't think of anything that would work. She tried simple designs and impossible designs. They all looked stupid and ugly.

Eri had said so. Eri had said that she would never be a designer.

Shiki could spend hours and hours cutting and sewing and seam ripping and resewing and she could make something perfect, as long as someone else had given her the idea. She had tried to put together things without Eri's advice before. The colors hadn't matched, the shape wasn't flattering...

It wasn't like clothing companies needed people to sew the way she did anymore. They had people working in factories in other countries to do the work. They didn't need someone like her, even if she knew just the right number of times to go over a button so that it would be strong enough to handle even the roughest treatment.

They needed people who were creative. People who could make designs that walked along that delicate line between trendy and original.

They didn't need people who were only technically good.

**_Writer's Woes: another weird vent-y solo character drabble-y thing. I figured I should actually post something on here so I uh posted this bit of awkward obviously written late at night wonderfullness. (a lot of my feelings about my own writing are in here shhhh don't tell anyone it's a secret) I want to write maybe a nice thing where Shiki and Neku talk about creativity and inspiration so maybe I could add something positive and not depressing to this series! I hope so! _**

**_If I may be personal I've been feeling kind of down lately... so yeah. I thought school would make it better and it is nice to not be at home but now I have lots of work and stress and I'm avoiding things as I type this out. I've never had a good posting schedule and I'm sorry if there's anyone out there who wants more of this and isn't getting anything. If you really would like more, tell me, I guess. _**

**_Stay Fabulous, _**

**_Hillary _**


	5. Face

"You know, I never had trouble telling you two apart."

"Really? Is it okay to ask how?"

"Yeah, and it's because of… your face."

"But I had her face!"

"No, it's… the way you move your face… it's different."

"Like I make different expressions?"

…

"I'm gonna take this awkward silence as a sign that you want me to explain."

"Explaining would be nice. You don't have to if you don't want to, of course!"

"No, it's okay. I'm having trouble finding words for it. It's like… you aren't as extreme?"

"I guess I can see that. Eri always opens her mouth really huge when she's shocked about something. And then she sometimes just freezes so that I notice whatever crazy face she's making. It's pretty funny."

"And I think another thing is that you smile with your mouth and not your teeth."

"'Mmmm, I never really noticed that. Weird!"

"Now the real question is if you'd notice me if I were Eri."

"Now, that's really weird!"

**_Writer's Woes: I wanted to write something that was all dialogue and this was what happened. I've wanted to use this idea for like ever so yeah now it's done but I feel like I still want to do stuff with it. I really like thinking of all the ways that Shiki would project her not-Eri-ness during the Game. And I seem to have this running thing of Shiki being hyper-aware of Neku's social needs. I feel like his people problem was more than just being a prickly teenager. My headcanon is that he has some sort of social anxiety which makes it harder to deal with people and he was overwhelmed by it before the Game, but he's managing it better now. He's an introvert by nature, which means sometimes he just needs to be alone. _**


End file.
